Oracle or octopus?
Unlike Snowball, the recent biography of Warren Buffett, the even more recent Buffett Beyond Value promises to help us understand and emulate the World’s greatest investor, rather than tell his life story.
It does, to a degree. Author, Prem C Jain, a finance professor, has studied 50 years of annual reports and earlier...
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Getting your hands dirty…
Value investing goes against the grain. A rising share price is a sign of success, and investors favour companies that are doing well. But buying shares cheaply often means investing in unpopular companies. To pick decent companies and stick with them, requires knowledge and confidence. As I wrote in part 1...
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First steps in value investing
Last year I offered a course in value investing through our local adult education service. The course never happened because only one person applied, but my applicant became a correspondent and is now on the way to becoming a self-taught value investor. But as she’s discovering, learning is one thing,...
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Poking holes in free markets
The subject of last week’s blog, John Lanchester is one of many novelists, journalists and economists with books out on the financial crisis, blaming, in part, the madness of crowds of traders (and regulators), for rendering markets much less efficient than we thought.
Conventional financial models, they argue, rely on the...
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Smiling all the way to the bank
Karl Rabeder is happy, he’s giving away his £3m fortune and plans to have nothing left. His conviction:
I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need.Is a growing meme, picked up by the novelist John Lanchester (and...
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Things to read and watch
From this week I’m increasing the blog posting schedule to three posts, typically on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Friday’s blog, ‘Weekend wisdom’ will be a collection of notes on the best things I read, or watched, that week and takes the place of the links that used to appear at...
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Prediction is futile
One of many things this year taught me is that prediction is futile. I didn’t think the FTSE All-share would finish 33% or so higher than it was at the end of November 2009 when I wrote about two lists of shares, classic value shares, and net-nets. The market was crashing then.
2009...
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Read this book!
If you knew nothing about the stockmarket but happened upon Value Investing the old-fashioned way in a shop, you’d probably return it to the shelf sharpish. Certainly after reading a little of the preface.
James Montier’s on a crusade against the financial orthodoxy: Efficient Markets, Modern Portfolio Theory, the Capital Asset Pricing...
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Dawkins dates earth, says God created it…
Before I bashed the Efficient Markets Hypothesis again last week. I looked it up in what must surely be the ordinary investor’s efficient markets bible, Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street. The book is in its ninth edition, and my copy has ‘Over 1 Million Copies...
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